'Philadelphia Phiction' Opens At Walnut Studio

By Nels Nelson, Daily News Theater Critic

Posted: March 16, 1990

The Arden Theatre Company's season finale, which opened last night in the Walnut's fifth-floor studio space, consists of 14 pieces by eight writers who live in the Philadelphia area or have some connection thereto, whose work - short stories, poems, one-act plays - was picked out of some 300 submissions and adapted to an omnibus format by Terrence J. Nolen and Aaron Posner, producing and artistic director, respectively, of the Arden, and free-lance director-choreographer Deborah Block.

This "eclectic collage" has been whimsically titled "Philadelphia Phiction." Fiction it is, but little of it, beyond a very brief piece on ''Philly Summer Fountains," seems to have a significantly Philadelphia flavor. And I say, thank heaven for the omissions. There isn't a trace of a whisper about our quaint vernacular, cheese steaks, Schuylkill punch, the Mummers or the mayors we have known and loved.

I would not, in fact, have thought that such a wide selection of smart contemporary material had been flowing from local pens - but then the Ardenites are continually showing us that they are capable of small miracles.

The evening opens with a bright and amusing bit of doggerel from one Hank Schwemmer about "Jeremy Jason McDaniel McGrath," a boy who dreads mightily taking a bath, and trips its way merrily through Donald Barthelme's winning little saga of oneupmanship featuring Maggie and Hilda on the steps of the

The pick of Act 1 is another Barthelme piece, "The School," in which a feckless teacher, played with consummate wryness by Tim Moyer, reviews a term in which class projects involving trees, snakes, salamanders, tropical fish and so on, have ended precipitately with the deaths of the flora and fauna involved - a jinx that extends inexplicably to a number of parents and grandparents and even a couple of the pupils themselves. The surviving pupils choose, as their next project, a classroom demonstration of sexual mechanics by the teacher and his female assistant. A knock on the door and the entrance of a stray gerbil rescues the demonstrators in the nick of time.

Act 2 commences with the longest piece of the evening and the core of the production, "Paint," which was adapted by Nolen from a short story by Rachel Simon in a collection soon to be published by Houghton Mifflin.

In "Paint," a promiscuous 15-year-old vagrant goes to work as an artist's model and discovers that she, herself, is going to be the canvas in a continuing seven-part environmental work. In a reverse Pygmalion twist, the work of art transforms the artist from an indecisive scapegoat into a man sure of his gifts and his worth. Murph Henderson and, again, Moyer, give sensitive performances as the girl and the artist, respectively, and provide a palpable solidity for an evening that is otherwise determinedly though entertainingly lightheaded.